
ALEXANDER 

JOHNSTON 


AND HIS CONTRIBUTIONS 
TO POLITICAL SCIENCE 


Read before the Academy of Political Science 
Hamilton Hall, Columbia University 








VO ^ O'-. 1 ' ^ 


Alexander Johnston 


AND HIS CONTRIBUTIONS 
TO POLITICAL SCIENCE 


Read before the Academy of Political Science 
Hamilton Hall, Columbia University 


MAY 5, 1891 




NOTE 


The death of Alexander Johnston occurred on July 21, 1889. 
The following address was read before the Academy of Political 
Science, Hamilton Hall, Columbia University, on May 5, 1891. 

No suitable memorial having appeared, I have felt impelled 
to print the address for distribution among a few of Professor 
Johnston’s friends and admirers, although conscious how imper¬ 
fectly it portrays the value of his work. 

J. Hampden Dougherty. 

October 27, 1900. 







ALEXANDER JOHNSTON 

AND HIS CONTRIBUTIONS 
TO POLITICAL SCIENCE 

Read before the Academy of Political Science , May 5, 1891 


T HE death of Alexander Johnston, at the age of forty years, 
terminated the career of one of the ablest and most bril¬ 
liant contributors to American political science that the 
country has produced since the close of the civil war. His was a 
life that was unique in its devotion to one great subject; success 
came to him while young, and the promise which shone from his 
first book was fulfilled in his later works. The mere bulk of his 
writings on our political history shows how easily and continu¬ 
ously he must have labored, but so ample a writer would not have 
won the high praise which his works have evoked had he been 
merely what Mommsen, with scant justice, calls Cicero, “ an empty 
but voluminous author.” The posthumous fame of Johnston does 
not rest upon the fact that his productivity was so great that at the 
age of forty he left behind him works equaling in volume the 
writings of Macaulay or surpassing those of Robertson; that in less 
than ten years his literary activity created as much as Motley or Pres¬ 
cott composed in lives terminating in the sixties; it is based upon 
the sterling character of his work, and what, without too generous 
praise, or without disparagement of the efforts of co-laborers, may 
be called a unique service to political science. The many tributes 
which his death called forth from the press, both in the United States 
and in England—where he ranked among the best known of our 
American political authors—and the opinions of his merits which 
have since found expression in recent political literature, are ample 



6 


justification of a memorial of one who was so brilliant an exponent 
of the science to which this academy is devoted. 

In his “ Beginnings of American History,” Professor John Fiske, 
who in earlier works has repeatedly recorded his high estimate of 
Professor Johnston, truthfully says that he was unrivaled in his 
special field, and that “ his early death must be regarded as nothing 
less than a national calamity.” 

The work he had done was but the foundation upon which he 
proposed to rear that which he felt himself destined to do; it was 
but an introduction, like the “ Introduction to the History of Civ¬ 
ilization in England,” which the brilliant and philosophical, although 
somewhat sophistical, Buckle, himself also a victim of early death, 
has left as his literary monument. The foundations which Johnston 
reared are, however, of such a nature that others, imbibing his 
spirit, may continue the building, whereas none but Buckle him¬ 
self could have constructed the edifice which he proposed to raise; 
and in this respect the labor of our historian was more fortunate, 
as well as greater. A master workman has fallen, but the fabric 
will not be allowed to remain unfinished or to crumble into ruin. 

Alexander Johnston was descended from a nation distinguished 
for its shrewd sense, its ready sagacity, and remarkable deductive 
powers. He was of Scotch extraction both upon his father’s and 
his mother’s side. I have heard him, in his almost inimitable 
style, describe his researches while a boy into the pedigree of his 
family. Inquiring once of an uncle, all that he could learn was 
that the Johnstons were Lowlanders, who had once borne the name 
of the “ reiving ” Johnstons. Conceiving this, as he mirthfully 
said, to be the family’s patent .of nobility, he became intensely 
anxious to ascertain the meaning of the adjective, until finally, 
lighting upon an old glossary, he discovered that the term was 
derived from the language of border warfare, and implied so bad 
a reputation for thieving and cattle stealing along the borders be¬ 
tween England and Scotland that at once all further genealogical 
aspirations were extinguished. His ancestors were doubtless such 
honest, respectable people as Carlyle describes in his Reminiscences 
in referring to persons of this name. He came of pious, sensible, 
and intelligent stock, the stock which constituted the yeomanry 
of Scotland, and to which Walter Scott—still, in the judgment of 
lovers of true literature, an unrivaled master of fiction—was proud 
to belong. 


7 


Alexander Johnston was born in Brooklyn in April, 1849. The 
period of his birth was an eventful one in the history of the United 
States. The “ war by act of Mexico ” had been victoriously closed. 
Mexico had ceded some of her provinces to the United States; in 
one of these gold had been discovered, a fever of immigration into 
California had seized the people of the East, a state government 
had been erected there, and the State was knocking at the doors 
of the Union for admission into the American sisterhood. Ex¬ 
citement over the Wilmot proviso, which had been temporarily 
lulled by a treaty of cession with Mexico without any stipulation 
as to slavery, had broken out afresh, for California, peopled by 
free men, had adopted a constitution forbidding slavery, and the 
famous compromise of 1850—a compromise planned forever to 
terminate all sectional agitation, but destined to fan it into fiercer 
life—was about to be arranged. It was an epoch pregnant with 
great events, such an epoch as in the history of civilization always 
gives rise to great minds. 

Concerning the early boyhood of Alexander Johnston there is 
little to be learned. He early took to books, and became a rapid 
and omnivorous reader. Many of the literary allusions to be found 
in his writings may be traced to the reading of his boyish years. 
His mind from infancy was quick and clear. He did not, as an 
uncle once said of him, have to learn his lessons like other boys; 
if he read a lesson he seemed to be master of it. Part of his 
scholastic training he received at home, and he seems to have felt 
that he owed much to this circumstance. When the writer first 
became acquainted with him, he was a boy of eleven or twelve, 
among the youngest in his class, which was the highest class in 
a Brooklyn public school. The old adage, that the boy is the 
father of the man, was never better exemplified: there were the 
same broad, full brow, the same clear eye, a physique not frail yet 
not robust, a mirthful humor, a poised temper, an eager mind, dis¬ 
tinguished by its precocious clearness and penetration. He was, 
of course, easily first, and the rank which he took in the school 
was yielded to him as a matter of right, and was maintained by 
him in his later school, and in his college, life. The class of which 
I speak was, at the time of Johnston’s connection with it, under 
the charge of a woman of superior qualifications for her post, and 
this lady had the sagacity to discern the nascent powers of the boy. 
Two instances of his precocity are indelibly stamped upon my 


8 


memory: one was a composition bearing the title “ Good Humor,” 
in which with many a striking antithesis that quality was distin¬ 
guished from wit; the other was an explanation of Hero’s foun¬ 
tain, the subject of a day’s lesson in physics. Here the boy showed 
an intelligence far ahead of his classmates, and a knowledge of 
the subject which, considering the meager explanation of the text¬ 
book, demonstrated the reasoning and philosophical character of 
his mind. In short, in all those studies which summoned the judg¬ 
ment and the reasoning and analytical faculties into play he was 
certain to excel. 

The public school which he attended was singularly fortunate 
in its possession of an excellent library, to the privileges of which 
the scholars of his class had access. None availed themselves more 
freely of the opportunity for good reading than Johnston, and the 
influence of this library upon his career may well serve to demon¬ 
strate the value of such an addition to all our public schools. In 
that day circulating libraries were not common in Brooklyn, and 
even the slight fee charged in such libraries might perhaps have 
restricted his access to books—“ those splendid palaces,” as Bulwer 
describes them, “ open to all, rich and poor.” The library of the 
school was well stocked with standard historical and other books, 
and it is, I believe, to its existence and the opportunities it gave 
to a mind eager for knowledge, that the literary tastes of Alexander 
Johnston are largely to be attributed. Certain it is that here 
they were cultivated and developed. Even at this early date, his 
chief delight was in American history; and his precocious, if im¬ 
mature, mind was attracted to the constitutional questions which 
were then the staple of daily conversation and of newspaper debate. 
He read voluminously but intelligently, and I do not hesitate to 
affirm my conviction that before he went to college he was as 
thoroughly familiar with the facts of every period of American 
history as he ever was in later years. De Quincey, in his auto¬ 
biography, says that when he entered Oxford, at fifteen, he was 
familiar with the whole range of Greek literature, and that from 
his childhood he had been “ a reader, nay, a student, of Demos¬ 
thenes,” while at the same age he knew the English poets well and 
took a pleasure in the ancient English metrical romances. Apart 
from the amplitude of the classical knowledge which his essays 
exhibit, a knowledge which must have been early acquired, that 
his assertion is not the romantic tale of a victim of opium is estab- 


9 


lished by the well-authenticated story that, while he was a student 
at Oxford, one of the professors said to another, as the boy passed 
them, “ There goes a lad who could harangue an Athenian audience 
better than you or I could address an English one.” So it may 
be said of Johnston, his boyish reading had made all the epochs 
of the nation’s life, from its earliest and hardly conscious impulses 
toward union in pre-Revolutionary days to the dramatic incidents 
which were daily enacted about him in his youth, familiar history. 
No other explanation so adequate can be given of his absolute and 
unrivaled command of the facts of the nation’s life. He was no 
poacher upon the field of political literature. He wrote, as he spoke, 
from an abundant mind and the amplest control of facts. He was 
not always original; and because of the vast width of the territory 
he laid under tribute he was, like all large minds, greatly indebted 
to others. But all that he wrote gives evidence of the complete¬ 
ness with which he had assimilated what he had read, and often 
of the advantage which the ideas of others derived from filtering 
through his lucid and philosophical mind. 

His method was that by which all truth, whether scientific or 
philosophical, is to be attained—the Baconian method. In his 
mastery of facts he reminds one of Charles Darwin, whose reputa¬ 
tion, great as it deservedly is for the highest generalizing power, 
was first laid in a sober and complete conquest of the facts of 
Nature, begun in early life. 

I have dwelt upon this epoch of Johnston’s life and the char¬ 
acter of his historical studies in boyhood because I conceive a 
knowledge of these facts to be essential to a proper understanding 
of the work which he did, and a needed counterpoise to the notion 
that so voluminous a writer is likely to be full of inaccuracies. 
Brougham somewhere animadverts with severity upon the numer¬ 
ous errors in Hume’s history; errors, it seems, which the great 
philosopher himself candidly acknowledged, and the existence of 
which his critic ascribed to the rapidity with which he wrote and 
the insufficiency of his studies. No such charge could be main¬ 
tained against Johnston. His writings are not exempt from de¬ 
fects; he was quick to confess them, and he was never impatient 
at corrections. But it would be a mistake to assume that when, 
as we shall see later, he threw away the Greek grammar upon 
which he was engaged and turned his attention to the field of 
American history, it was as a novice. He was a master of his 


IO 


subject before he wrote the first line of the American Political His¬ 
tory—his first book, which was published in 1879. 

During the civil war his father entered military service, and 
about this time the boy left the public school and moved to Astoria, 
where he took up his residence with a maternal uncle, by whose 
assistance he was enabled to prepare for college. I can not but 
recall with distinctness the last time I saw him in his Brooklyn 
home, seated in a room with his mother, a great volume of Amer¬ 
ican history open before him. He entered Rutgers College in 1866, 
and by dint of teaching and the kindness of his uncle he prosecuted 
his college work, and was graduated, in 1870, with the highest 
honors the college could bestow. While at Rutgers he was en¬ 
amored of the classics, and became a brilliant Greek and Latin 
scholar. After graduating he resolved to study law, and for this 
purpose entered the office of Governor George Ludlow, at Trenton. 
He was admitted to the bar of New Jersey in 1875. Had he re¬ 
mained at the bar he would surely have achieved professional 
distinction, for he had all the qualifications of a successful lawyer. 
Possessed of an inexhaustible fund of anecdote, of a lively wit, a 
versatile, ready, and penetrative mind, and of a prodigious capacity 
for work, he could not have failed of high eminence as an advocate. 
But, although well equipped for the encounters of the forum, hev 
shrank from devotion to the narrow problems of the profession, for 
he was a born jurist, with a keen zest for the discussion and eluci¬ 
dation of great principles. The death of his father, who had retired 
from the army with shattered health, brought him responsibilities 
as the eldest son, and so he settled into the more quiet but no less 
influential vocation of a teacher, and took a place in the Rutgers 
Grammar School. He had, however, no aversion to the law, having 
probably been diverted from it more by circumstance than inclina¬ 
tion; and he freely recognized not only the benefit he had derived 
from the study of jurisprudence, but also the powerful and com¬ 
manding position which the bar has always held in the United States, 
and its influence upon the development of American institutions. 
Nevertheless his choice was wise, for he could not have accommo¬ 
dated himself to the routine of the profession, and his nature was 
too lofty for him to have ever merited the scorn which Carlyle 
pours upon the lawyer who regards his intellect, his “ highest 
heavenly gift,” as a loaded pistol hung up in a shop window for 
sale, to be had by whomsoever pays the price. His would have 


been the traditional notions of professional ethics—the high aims 
which, in these money-making times, can not be too often com¬ 
mended or too earnestly pursued. 

After spending two years in the Rutgers Grammar School he 
moved to Norwalk, Conn., and accepted the office of classical teacher 
in an institution in that town. Here, says the Norwalk Gazette in 
an obituary notice of Professor Johnston, he soon made himself 
a special favorite with the students; and as his acquaintance ex¬ 
tended his popularity increased, for his broad and sympathetic na¬ 
ture and his conversational charm were such as to endear him to 
all associates. He afterward opened a day school for boys, the 
purpose of which was to qualify his scholars to enter college. 

Thus far his chief work had been in the classics. But it had 
not been the mere routine labor which stifles the aspirations of many 
able men. He had become convinced that the classics were in¬ 
adequately and imperfectly taught, because the system of teaching 
was unwise. He conceived the idea of preparing a Greek Grammar 
and Reader, which, if they should meet with employment, might 
render the study of Greek simpler and more profitable. He at 
once devoted himself to the composition of these books, but they 
were never completed. What seemed almost an accident led to 
the abandonment of his classical plans, and impelled him into the 
field for which Nature had destined him—of American history. 

Professor Johnston’s home in Norwalk, like his later home in 
Princeton, was a little Abbotsford, for it was impossible for those 
within the circle of his influence to resist the attraction of his mag¬ 
netic mind. Conversation often turning to American political topics, 
he soon became impressed with the ignorance of American history 
which many of his friends exhibited. He was finally asked to sug¬ 
gest a compendium which would supply the needed information. 
This question set him thinking, and the more he thought the clearer 
became the conviction that no such book really existed. Here 
was a gap in political literature that needed to be filled, and he 
resolved to fill it, and he did so with his History of American 
Politics. It was not an easy task to find a publisher for his book; 
the manuscript was rejected by several publishers; but perhaps it 
was no disadvantage, as Carlyle expresses it, that the door was 
several times slammed in his face, for these mortifying incidents 
did not daunt the young historian; on the contrary, they caused 
repeated scrutiny of his manuscript, and retouchings which made 


12 


it more nearly perfect. At last Messrs. Holt & Co., under advice 
of Mr. E. L. Godkin, decided to publish it. It appeared in 1879. 

“ The first copy,” says a friend of Professor Johnston, in a letter 
to the Evening Post, “ was given to Mrs. Johnston. The second 
went to Mr. Godkin, the editor of the Nation, with a note stating 
that the author had received a great amount of his political edu¬ 
cation from the columns of that paper, and asking the editor to 
accept the little book as an evidence of his appreciation. This 
must certainly have gratified Mr. Godkin no less than did his answer 
please and surprise Professor Johnston. For with his thanks the 
editor sent the information that he had seen the History of Amer¬ 
ican Politics before; that in fact Mr. Holt had given him the manu¬ 
script to secure his opinion of its merits, and he had taken great 
pleasure in advising its publication.” 

The immediate success of the book proves that the author had 
supplied a long-felt want. It is original in its plan and execution. 
It is a concise account of party struggles since the adoption of 
the Constitution, the ratification of which almost at once gave rise 
to the parties which, under one name or another, have since been 
practically the only parties in American history: that of broad con¬ 
struction and that of a strict interpretation of the fundamental law 
of the Union. The genius of the author is shown as much in the 
omissions as in the text. There is not a doubtful sentence between 
the two covers of this little work, nor one that could be dispensed 
with as unessential to the subject. The book has passed through 
many editions, and was eventually carried down to the close of 
Garfield’s administration. One of the happiest of its successes is 
its impartiality. More than one critic has declared that it would 
be impossible, from its pages, to determine the writer’s own political 
bias. Since all that had hitherto been written upon American his¬ 
tory unfailingly betrayed the author’s political predilections, whether 
the author was a Bancroft, a Hildreth, or a Von Holst, this is 
certainly high praise. 

To this judicial faculty, which was so powerfully developed in 
Professor Johnston, may be ascribed the invitation he soon after¬ 
ward received to write the articles on American history for the then 
projected Political Cyclopaedia, since issued as Lalor’s Political 
Cyclopaedia. One of the editors of this contemplated work, while 
in a bookstore in Chicago, had his attention called to the History 
of American Politics as a book which did not reveal whether its 


l 3 


author was a Democrat or a Republican. He bought the work 
and read it, and the result of his perusal was a letter to Professor 
Johnston, requesting him to assume the task of writing a series 
of articles on American political history for the forthcoming Cyclo¬ 
paedia. The reply of Professor Johnston evinced his usual modesty; 
for, great as were his powers and clear as was his own appreciation 
of their true worth, he hesitated before embarking upon so vast 
an enterprise. But he could not altogether refuse, for, as he after¬ 
ward said in referring to the offer, the work was congenial, and 
was in a field which he had intended eventually to enter. He con¬ 
sented to write one or two initial articles. The first assigned to 
him was upon Abolition. He wrote the article and forwarded his 
manuscript. The hearty response which he received, accompanied 
by a check larger than he had expected, put to flight all his doubts. 
He then resolved to accept the offer, and to prepare all the articles. 

The editors wisely determined, as they state in their preface, to 
commit the preparation of all the articles upon the political history 
of the country to one writer, in order to insure thoroughness, con¬ 
ciseness, and the absence of repetition and redundancy. By such 
a course the articles gained in consistency as well as in brevity. 
The action of the editors in selecting Professor Johnston for this 
special work was highly approved as soon as the first volume ap¬ 
peared. Only those who knew him well can understand the diffi¬ 
dence with which he met the offer, for he was then fully equipped 
for the task. He had probably even then designed a philosophical 
treatise upon American political history; and had he lived he would, 
I believe, have written a work deserving to rank with that of Momm¬ 
sen upon Rome. The offer which confronted him seemed to be 
a sort of anticipation of his scheme, presented objectively, but he 
felt the responsibility which its acceptance involved and hence his 
hesitation. Had he refused, the work could undoubtedly have been 
done by other competent scholars, but it is not saying too much 
to assert that it could not have been better done. The articles from 
his pen are of several kinds—biographical, narrative, and philo¬ 
sophical—but he is rarely a mere narrator. 

The Cyclopaedia was completed in 1883. Professor Johnston’s 
contributions to it are simply wonderful, occupying about one fourth 
of the great volumes. His papers would fill several ordinary octavos. 
They are, however, rarely long, for he had by nature and by training 
the art of concise statement. The variety of the topics discussed 


H 


occasions the bulk, for the themes embrace the whole range of 
American political literature. There is a unity in the treatment 
which of itself would convince the reader that he had the work 
of one master before him. From the first article, upon “ Abolition 
and the Abolition Movement,” with its pregnant suggestions and 
clear presentation of the successive stages of the abolition move¬ 
ment, to the concluding one, which is upon the Yazoo frauds, with 
its criticism of John Marshall’s law, there are the same firm grasp 
of principles and the same broad and convincing treatment. What 
Lord Brougham has said of Hume’s Political Discourses may with 
fairness be applied to these Cyclopaedia articles of Professor John¬ 
ston : “ We read them as different and as short works upon various 
subjects, but we perceive at each step that we are guided by the 
same genius; that one spirit of inquiry pervades the whole, one 
view of national interests is taken throughout, one sagacious un¬ 
folder of truth, one accurate and bold discoverer of popular error 
is at work in each discourse.” 

Within the limits of this memorial it is not possible to attempt 
any special criticism. The general plan and the individual execu¬ 
tion of these articles have been widely praised. The style is always 
direct, few words are wasted in opening the topic under discussion, 
and before many sentences have been perused the reader finds that 
he has been launched upon a broad sea, but that there is a com¬ 
petent pilot at the helm. 

It is hardly possible to expect that so easy and abundant a 
writer should be guiltless of repetition; in fact, the character of the 
essays renders reiteration in a degree pardonable. Whoever atten¬ 
tively examines these articles will perceive that they often have a 
similar starting point, and that their paths must at times intersect, 
however wide may be the territory which they traverse. The repe¬ 
titions are never wearisome, but serve merely as guides to indicate 
the leading thoughts of the writer’s mind. 

The articles upon the “ Confederation,” the “ Constitutional 
Convention of 1787,” “ Reconstruction,” the “ Nation,” the “ Judi¬ 
ciary,” “ State Sovereignty,” the “ United States,” and upon other 
topics demonstrate that to the mind of Professor Johnston the his¬ 
tory of the United States was an evolution; that the most prominent 
characteristic in American history is what Judge Jameson has justly 
termed “ the irrepressible tendency toward Union.” The force of 
this movement is perceptible as far back as 1643 5 it gathers addi- 


i5 


tional momentum in 1748 and 1754; it becomes a sentiment of all 
“ America ” in 1774 and 1776; and, despite the particularist reaction 
which produced the Articles of Confederation, it reappears in the 
Constitution of 1787 and in the adoption of a supreme law over the 
people of the nation and all the States. How imperfect even this 
Union was he teaches again and again, showing how the nascent 
sense of nationality became first established with the War of 1812. 

The period of the Confederation was to him but an interregnum 
in our political history. The people of the several colonies had 
elected their delegates to the Continental Congress, and these con¬ 
gresses had lighted the first spark of national life; but the legis¬ 
latures of the States which this Union had called into existence, 
without legal warrant and in some instances even before State con¬ 
stitutions were adopted vesting them with such power, seized the 
prerogative of electing delegates to the Third Continental Congress, 
and eventually, but with no constitutional authority, claimed the 
right to ratify the articles of Confederation for their respective 
States. As he pertinently says: “ Whence the legislatures derived 
their authority to form, proprio vigore, any such general league can 
not be known, for the question was never mooted at the time. . . . 
It was the part of the people then, and not of the State legis¬ 
latures, to establish the new government; and had the people 
framed these articles, the act, however unwise, would have been 
perfectly legal. . . . The whole system must therefore be consid¬ 
ered, in our political history, as a period of interregnum, covering 
the time between the downfall of royal authority under the British 
Constitution in 1776-1780, and the final establishment of the popu¬ 
lar will in its place in 1789 under the American Constitution.” 
(Article on “ Confederation,” vol. i, p. 575.) 

“ This whole course of legislative appropriation of ungranted 
powers, is of interest and importance as explaining the manner in 
which the Continental Congress was becoming the creature of the 
State legislatures even before the close of the year 1776, and the 
underlying cause of the peculiar character of the confederation which 
follows.” (Article on “ Continental Congress,” vol. i, p. 591.) 

Many instances in which the particularist bias of the American 
people caused their actions and those of their representatives to 
swerve from the strict line of theory are considered under the 
“ Declaration of Independence ” and “ State Sovereignty.” 

With the logic of Von Holst and the ideas of Jameson, Pro- 


i6 


fessor Johnston is in harmony, and it does not detract from the 
value of his work to admit his obligations to these writers. But 
while the tendency of his political thinking led him to a general es¬ 
pousal of the view, in which these two writers concur, of the forma¬ 
tion of the Union, he was disposed, more judicially and more com¬ 
pletely than either of them, to acknowledge that the American 
political philosophy which, as the result of the civil war, is estab¬ 
lished at the close of the nineteenth century, is not a mere logical 
deduction, but that it is a growth, and that the whole course of its 
growth is marked by the most emphatic expressions of dissent 
against the now triumphant theory of the nation. No more of a 
believer in State sovereignty than Von Holst or Jameson, he more 
fully than they concedes that history has not been consistent. In 
his treatment of the subject of State sovereignty he discriminates 
admirably between State sovereignty and State rights; and while 
he denies the heresy, as it is now pronounced to be, of State sov¬ 
ereignty, he admits that the arguments from authority are quite 
evenly balanced. But, although the States have again and again 
declared themselves sovereign, and despite the fact that a formi¬ 
dable array of great names could be mustered in support of the claim, 
he quaintly reminds us that to say one is a sovereign is one thing, 
but to be one is another. “ The nation v/as made by events and 
by the acts of the national people, not by empty words or the will 
of sovereign States.” 

That the oft-asserted sovereignty of the States was a mere affair 
of words, not of reality or blood and iron, is thus shown: “ If the 
proximity of more powerful neighbors had ever compelled the 
American people to sacrifice one or more States or parts of States 
as the price of a treaty of peace, the fallacy of State sovereignty 
would have been exposed. . . . Free from dangerous neighbors, 
the American people did not, until 1861, learn the truth which bitter 
experience had made familiar to less favored quarters of the globe, 
that sovereignty is always potentially an affair of ‘ blood and iron ’; 
and that it needs not only men who know, or think they know, their 
rights, but men who, ‘ knowing, dare maintain/ ” The question 
where the sovereignty in America is located, he maintains, can be 
answered only by asking, Which dared to go alone, to carve out 
its own path, and achieve its own destiny—the nation or the State? 
The question answers itself. The States were never more than sov¬ 
ereignties in posse ; they never became sovereignties in esse. “ The 


J 7 


idea of a comatose sovereignty, of a sovereignty which sleeps like 
Rip Van Winkle, but wakes at the exercise of its own suspended 
will, of an uncontrollable will which still exists though it has re¬ 
signed its essence to another, of an abdicated sovereignty peace¬ 
fully reviving its own sovereignty, is certainly an extraordinary 
political dogma, and its evident fallacy is enough to disprove the 
notion that the States were ever sovereign. Above all, the pro¬ 
vision for constitutional amendment by three fourths, not by all, 
of the States, is a flat negative to State sovereignty.” (“ State Sov¬ 
ereignty,” vol. iii, pp. 792, 795.) “ A system under which a State 
submits its whole future destiny to an unlimited power of decision 
in three fourths of its associated States can hardly be called one of 
State sovereignty.” (Article on “ United States,” Encyclopaedia 
Britannica, ninth edition, p. 751.) 

“ A permanent federal union based upon the uncontrollable will 
of the States which composed it would be as impossible as a per¬ 
manent connection between man and woman without lawful mar¬ 
riage.” (Article on “ State Sovereignty,” Lalor’s Cyclopaedia, vol. 
iii, p. 797.) 

Yet how profound was his belief in the desirability or expedi¬ 
ency, if not the necessity, of the perpetuation of our State system 
is attested by the closing words of his article upon the “ Nation ”: 

“ While the future of the nation is a matter of speculation, we 
need feel no fear of the perpetuation of the States, for the law 
which governs the political workings of the American mind makes 
State formations an inseparable concomitant of national existence. 
... It is impossible to conceive a future American republic in which 
the State element shall be lacking. The nation would resist an 
attempt upon the life of the weakest and poorest State as instinc¬ 
tively and as desperately as upon its own. It is conscious in every 
fibre that it is a being which, like Milton’s angels, ‘ vital in every 
part, can not but by annihilating die.’ ” (Lalor’s Cyclopaedia, vol. ii, 

p- 936.) 

He does not allow that the people of New York or Virginia 
govern themselves less now than in 1789, but contends that “ under 
the silent but potentially omnipotent sovereignty of the nation the 
States, large and small, are enjoying a power of self-government 
which their own sovereignties could not have made more absolute. 
Rhode Island and Delaware, for example, are living their own pecul¬ 
iar life, under the national aegis, with an absolute fearlessness of 


18 

interference from their neighbors for which many a stronger State 
might well have bartered the Philistine armor of sovereignty. ,, 

The very causes which make State sovereignty dangerous and 
hateful to a nation make State rights dearer and more essential. 
A deeper shade of particularism is developing in the larger com¬ 
monwealths, with a growing diversity of interests in its different 
sections. States will be subdivided. The particularist feeling is 
exhibited in the recent demand of large cities for emancipation from 
State control over their purely local interests. 

Elsewhere he recurs to this same idea, notably in an article con¬ 
tributed to the New Princeton Review in September, 1887, to which 
we shall later refer more fully. He there says: “ The general cur¬ 
rent of interpretation [of the Constitution] has not tended to over¬ 
centralization. It is true that the Federal Government claims a 
larger sphere now than it did in 1789, but so also do the States.” 
State spirit has not declined. “ Local feeling, so far from decreas¬ 
ing, is continually finding narrower channels.” 

The amplitude of the knowledge of American political history 
exhibited in these Cyclopaedia articles; the intimate familiarity 
which they disclose with the writings of our leading statesmen of 
all epochs; their thorough impartiality; the wide acquaintance which 
they attest the author had with all varieties of political thought; their 
lucid directness; their striking originality, justly gained Professor 
Johnston wide celebrity and established his reputation as one of 
our leading political students and thinkers. Thus in three or four 
brief years he had risen from an unknown writer, seeking with the 
usual difficulties a publisher for his first book, to an author of 
acknowledged power. There was nothing meretricious in this 
advance, for it represented the study and reflection of many years, 
and was the outcome of the reading he had begun in his boyhood. 
To understand the value of these articles it is necessary to know 
something of the extent to which they have served students of our 
political history. In colleges and academies they have been steadily 
used, and many were the personal commendations which their 
author received from professors and teachers. Even our historians 
have not hesitated to avail themselves of this veritable treasure 
house of political wisdom. Not to mention others, the author of 
the greatest work upon America which our age has seen has re¬ 
peatedly, in his copious footnotes, acknowledged the extent to 
which he has drawn upon them. (Bryce's American Common- 


J 9 

wealth, 1889, vol. i, pp. 66, 283, 328; vol. ii, pp. 414, 415, 537, 538, 
666, 669.) 

The selection of a few fugitive passages such as we have cited 
does scant justice to the Cyclopaedia articles. They are replete with 
information and with the fresh, vigorous thoughts of a bright in¬ 
tellect. Whether the subject be abolition or slavery, the Virginia 
and Kentucky resolutions, nullification, that bastard offspring of 
Jefferson’s and Madison’s creed, or secession; whether the topic 
be the compromises of the Constitution, bank controversies, re¬ 
bellion, reconstruction (in the writer’s judgment the most admirable 
extant statement upon the subject), the Wilmot proviso, or merely 
a short biographical sketch, the articles may be fairly considered 
a mine of wealth for historical students, and they display the widest 
reading and most thorough assimilation upon the part of the author. 
I do not think there is extant a clearer or more striking essay 
than his upon the judiciary of the United States; in none other 
is the fundamental importance of the supreme law clause of the 
Constitution more emphasized or the participation of the Supreme 
Court of the United States in the nationalizing forces better de¬ 
scribed. His views of epochs and of men are alike impartial. A 
recent author has won deservedly high praise for a biography upon 
Van Buren, which, in the language of one of the leaders of our 
bar (Mr. William Allen Butler), long a personal friend of Van 
Buren, has set his character in a “ true historic light ”; but it will 
be found that in some short sketches in the Cyclopaedia, Professor 
Johnston has anticipated the author of “ Van Buren ” by present¬ 
ing as reasons for a more favorable verdict upon him the same 
instances in his public career as are afterward dwelt upon by his 
recent biographer. 

It is chiefly upon his articles concerning the great parties which 
have appeared in our history that his fame will rest. The articles 
upon the Federal party, the Democratic-Republican party, and the 
Republican party evince broad statesmanlike conceptions. As De 
Quincey somewhere finds a strong argument for the continuance 
of Christianity in that it is the religion of a book whose numerous 
texts must provoke endless discussion and thus insure its perma¬ 
nence as a religion, so Johnston discovers the necessity for the 
persistence of broad and loose constructionists in the very language 
of the Constitution; but he wisely inclines to the opinion that the 
coming democracy will relinquish the stronghold of its old leaders 


20 


—the denial of the doubtful powers of congress—and rather build 
its citadel upon the inexpediency of their exercise and the wisdom 
of repressing all undue tendency toward a strong central govern¬ 
ment. 

The modest principal of the Latin school at Norwalk had made 
for himself a national reputation. Henceforth his services were 
in demand both as writer and teacher. Flattering offers came to 
him from the East and from the West, and among others the proffer 
of the chair of Political Economy and Jurisprudence at Princeton. 
He would have preferred a place which was more strictly repre¬ 
sentative of what he now justly considered his true vocation, but 
he accepted the post and continued in it until his death. 

It has been charged that Professor Johnston was merely a 
specialist, deficient in wide knowledge of philosophy and without 
broad sympathies with literature. A specialist he certainly was, 
of a high order, in the same sense as Darwin, for devotion to a 
specialty is the only modern road to high achievement; but the 
remainder of the accusation is untrue, and could be made only by 
one unfamiliar with his attainments. The versatility of his gifts 
and the great scope of his powers could hardly be better shown 
than by recalling the classical work to which he devoted several 
of his post-collegiate years, the contemplated Greek grammar, the 
vast historical work he did from 1879 to 1884, and his service as 
professor of Political Economy in an ancient and distinguished seat 
of learning. Jurisprudence he had studied, but of political economy 
he had only a superficial knowledge when he accepted a chair at 
Princeton. Almost before he entered the university, certainly 
before he gave his first lecture, he had mastered all there was to 
be acquired, including even the works of authors not commonly 
ranked among economists—such as De Quincey and Ruskin. From 
the first hour of his contact with his classes his work was a success. 
He seized with avidity the leading principles of his subject, and 
with his vigorous intellect, fascinating manner, and wonderful power 
of illustration he made the study of the “ dismal ” science delightful 
to his scholars. One secret of his success lay in the receptivity 
and impressionableness of his mind. He was always learning, and 
with a mind charged with the best thoughts of others he was always 
imparting what he had learned, but in such an original and striking 
manner as to evince that perhaps his greatest faculty was that of 


21 


the teacher, whether in the schoolroom, the college, upon the 
lyceum, as editor, or as author. He seized as if by instinct upon 
the substance of a book; hence he made an excellent reviewer. 
It has been related of him by the editor of the Norwalk Gazette, 
to whose paper he was a frequent contributor during his life in 
Norwalk, that during the Garfield campaign the editor, having been 
hastily called upon for a review of Major Bundy’s life of Garfield, 
could conceive of no one better fitted than Mr. Johnston to write 
a prompt and exhaustive review. He therefore visited Johnston 
one afternoon, handed him a copy of the book, and requested a 
criticism upon it. Upon the following morning Mr. Johnston en¬ 
tered the editor’s office, and to his great astonishment handed 
him a review of the book. He had read the life and had finished 
a criticism upon it before retiring. This review was subsequently 
pronounced by General Garfield to be one of the best which had 
come under his observation. 

But the task of lecturing upon political economy and jurispru¬ 
dence did not abate his ardor for American history. He prepared 
two histories of the United States for use in schools, one a more 
advanced work designed for older students, both of which have 
been highly praised and deserve wide circulation, and he wrote also 
the article upon the United States in R. E. Thompson’s American 
Supplement to the Britannica. In 1885 he edited and, through 
the Messrs. Putnam, published three volumes of American orations. 

The same conception of the synthesis of our political life under¬ 
lies these essays which we discover in the Cyclopaedia articles 
and in all his other political work. The colonial period is por¬ 
trayed, then the first tendencies toward union, with their partial 
check under the articles of confederation, then the recurrence to 
the true idea of a national existence in the formation of the present 
Constitution; the reactionary influences which impeded the progress 
of the new government and fed the spirit of particularism, the rise 
of a truly national sentiment with the second war with England, 
the strengthening of that sentiment with the settlement of the West, 
with the great European immigrations and the first appearance of 
railroads; the portentous cloud of slavery with its inevitable alter¬ 
nations of policy between strict and loose construction of the Con¬ 
stitution as the needs of slavery seemed to indicate; the civil war, 
reconstruction, and the industrial epoch upon which the country 
is now launched. 


22 


In these short articles Professor Johnston is at his best. Im¬ 
moderate length is a development of the modern essay; the papers 
of Addison and Swift are usually short and pithy. Like the earlier 
masters of English prose, of whom he was a student both directly 
and through their disciples, our own early writers, Johnston knew 
how to be brief without being obscure. These papers, as he once 
stated to the writer, caused him more trouble than any others he 
had written. De Quincey, in an essay upon style, speaks of the 
importance of the joints of composition. The joints of these short 
narrations are artistically framed, and the reader glides from topic 
to topic, intelligently and with a consciousness that the author has 
a due idea of proportion. Nothing essential is omitted, detail is 
scrupulously avoided, yet the canvas holds a complete picture 
painted with master touches. 

The purpose of the author is stated in his preface, which also 
reveals his judicial temper. 

Of the author’s essays in this compilation, perhaps the most 
striking are those upon “ Slavery and Reconstruction,” although 
students of our later history may find much food for study in the 
essay upon tariffs. I can not dismiss these papers without men¬ 
tion of their just reflections upon the services of Jefferson, whose 
policy, “ with all its shifts and inconsistencies, was,” the author truly 
says, “ to forward the freedom of the individual.” “ There is hardly 
any point in which the action of the individual American has been 
freed from governmental restraints, from ecclesiastical government, 
from sumptuary laws, from restrictions on suffrage, from restric¬ 
tions on commerce, production, and exchange, for which he is not 
indebted in some measure to the work and teaching of Jefferson 
between 1790 and 1800.” While the Jeffersonian democracy repre¬ 
sented “ all the individualistic tendencies of the later science of 
political economy, Hamiltonian federalism represented the necessary 
corrective of law.” . . . “ It was impossible for federalism to resist 
the individualistic tendency of the country for any length of time; 
it is the monument of the (Federal) party that it secured, before it 
fell, abiding guarantees for the security of the individual under 
freedom.” 

No one has, I think, better presented the results of the second 
war with Britain than the subject of this memorial, and his idea 
recurs throughout his numerous works. Beyond the naval suc¬ 
cesses of the war there is little in that epoch, as Henry Adams has 


shown in his brilliant volumes upon Jefferson’s and Madison’s 
administrations, upon which the patriotic American can dwell with¬ 
out a sense of humiliation. The passion for peace which had be¬ 
come the policy of Jefferson, and which Madison imbibed from 
him, had abased us to such an extent in the eyes of France and 
Great Britain that it was openly asserted that no affront, how¬ 
ever galling to the sense of a free people, could goad us into war. 
That the War of 1812 should have been baptized “ Mr. Madison’s 
war,” when the President was about the most unwilling participant 
in it, shows how far the coercion of a widespread sentiment can 
influence party leaders. The war sprang out of the national feel¬ 
ing which had been accumulating momentum with every renewed 
instance of American submission. “ It was of incalculable benefit 
to the United States,” in advancing the idea of nationality; and 
the development of this idea was, in the author’s opinion, worth 
all the precedent humiliation and the gross mismanagement and 
blunders which marked the course of the conflict. And as sig¬ 
nificant of the rise of a real nationality, he asserts that “ in the 
North and West, at least, the old States rights formulas never 
carried a real vitality beyond the War of 1812. Men still spoke 
of * sovereign States ’ and prided themselves on the difference be¬ 
tween ‘ the voluntary union of States ’ and the effete despotisms 
of Europe, but the ghost of the Hartford Convention had laid very 
many more dangerous ghosts in the section in which it had ap¬ 
peared.” 

The impulse toward nationalism which forced “ Madison’s war ” 
and annihilated the opposition of New England, despite the injury 
which the war caused that section, created and supplied the spirit 
which, after its close, sought to bring the several sections into a 
more complete union. The war made apparent the necessity of 
public roads and better intercommunication among the States, and 
did much to originate the policy of internal improvements. The 
war and the blockades forced American manufactures into exist¬ 
ence and inaugurated the policy of protection. Even the most 
rigorous opponent of the doctrine of internal improvements must 
admit that the party which was thus brought into being has unified 
and consolidated the country. 

It was the tariff of 1816 which, creating in the manufacturers 
an expectation of protection, destroyed the last vestige of the Fed¬ 
eral party rather than the opposition to the war itself. Coincident 


I 

24 

with the war came the steamboat, and soon afterward the canal; 
and these factors of improvement were soon followed by the rail¬ 
road with its wonderful unionizing influence. Convulsions in 
Europe produced the great immigrations, which sought the country 
rather than any particular State, and they were distributed by the 
railroads through the North and West. The immigrants shunned 
the South, with its peculiar institution, as they would the plague. 
Thus the North and West were tending year after year toward 
nationalization, while the South, excluded from the benefits which 
the canal, the steamboat, and the railroad were bringing the North, 
gradually crystallized into a separate imperium in imperio , a quasi 
nationality of its own. 

In 1883, Professor Johnston read a paper, entitled “ The Gene¬ 
sis of a New England State,” before the Johns Hopkins Society. 
The essay was subsequently expanded, and was incorporated in the 
volume entitled “ Connecticut,” contributed to the American Com¬ 
monwealth Series. In “ Connecticut,” which was published in 1887, 
the idea developed by the author is bold and brilliant. He traces 
the lineage of true democracy back, not to the compact in the cabin 
of the Mayflower, but to the three little towns—Hartford, Windsor, 
and Wethersfield—which, seceding for religious reasons from their 
parent towns in Massachusetts, were organized upon the banks of 
the Connecticut. Democracy had its real birthplace at Hartford. 
Here, under the preaching of the Rev. Thomas Hooker, who had 
imbibed his notions of civil and religious liberty from the great 
thinkers of the Cromwellian period, were planted the germs of gov¬ 
ernment by the people, for the people, and of the people. All that 
Massachusetts could justly wear upon her escutcheon was a bar 
sinister. The Mayflower compact opens with a formal acknowl¬ 
edgment of the king as the source of all authority, while the notion 
of class distinctions pervades the governmental framework of the 
Massachusetts colony from its earliest commencement, and the 
franchise in that colony was based upon church membership. 
Hooker, on the contrary, with more profoundly democratic con¬ 
viction, taught that “ the foundation of authority is laid in the 
consent of a free people ”; and that “ the choice of public magis¬ 
trates belongs unto the people, by God’s allowance.” The charter 
or constitution framed by the three towns (Hartford, Windsor, and 
Wethersfield), ignoring all ecclesiastical restrictions, gave the right 
of suffrage to non-church members as well as to church members. 


25 


Upon the broad basis of manhood suffrage, the citizens of the 
three towns built the first constitution of Connecticut—“ the first 
written constitution, in the modern sense of the term, as a per¬ 
manent limitation on governmental power known in history, and 
certainly the first American constitution of government to embody 
the democratic idea.” 

The leading idea of the book is the development of the town 
system into a State and its influence upon the subsequent govern¬ 
ment both of the commonwealth and the nation. “ Every religious 
dispute ” (in New England) “ gave rise to a new town, until the 
faintest lines of theological divergence were satisfied.” The first 
settlements at Hartford, Windsor, and Wethersfield, although irrup¬ 
tions into unorganized and unoccupied territory—such as, for ex¬ 
ample, the settlement of Iowa two centuries later—were, unlike the 
Iowa settlement or later settlements, irruptions not of individuals 
but of organized towns. Each of these towns had gone into the 
wilderness, the only organized power within its jurisdiction. They 
are compared with their prototypes, the German tuns; they were, 
borrowing a physiological analogy, political “ cells.” 

The peculiarity of the commonwealth jurisdiction of Connecticut 
is that it was the product, instead of the source, of its town system. 
In other commonwealths the central authority is the source 'of 
the town life. But in Connecticut the towns created the common¬ 
wealth, and the consequent federative idea has steadily influenced 
colony and State alike. The town is the residuary legatee of polit¬ 
ical power; the State has to make out a clear case for powers which 
it claims as against the towns, and the towns have a prima facie 
case in their favor in all cases of doubt. 

“ All this,” continues the author, “ is so like the standard theory 
of the relations of the States to the Federal Government that it 
is necessary to notice the peculiar exactness with which the rela¬ 
tions of Connecticut towns to the commonwealth are proportioned 
to the relations of the commonwealth to the United States. In 
other States power runs from the State upward and from the State 
downward; in Connecticut the towns have always been to the com¬ 
monwealth as the commonwealth to the Union. It was to be the 
privilege of Connecticut to keep the notion of this federal relation 
alive until it could be made the fundamental law of all the common¬ 
wealths in 1787-1789. In this respect the life principle of the 
American Union may be traced straight back to the primitive union 


26 


of the three little settlements on the bank of the Connecticut 
River.” (P. 62.) 

The constitution which the three towns gave to the infant colony, 
besides recognizing the right of all freemen to the franchise, created 
a bicameral legislature or “ corte ”; the deputies sitting in one 
chamber were representatives of the three towns as individual polit¬ 
ical existences, the magistrates sitting in the other represented the 
towns collectively. This distinction was the germ of the subsequent 
bicameral system of Connecticut, which apportions representatives 
in one house to the towns and to the popular vote in the other. 
In these dual existences, of an imperium and imperia in imperio , 
is the germ of the idea which afterward found such noble fruitage 
in the Constitutional Convention of 1787. 

Two plans of representation and legislation were advocated in 
the Philadelphia convention—one the large State, the other the small 
State plan. The large States desired to create a bicameral con¬ 
gress and to base representation in each house upon population, 
and their plan would have given the large States—in other words, 
the majority—control of each house. The smaller States, fearful 
of the encroachments of their more populous and powerful neigh¬ 
bors, jealously maintained the system, familiar under the articles 
of confederation, of a single house in which the States should have 
representation as equals. New York, apparently unconscious of 
her great future, made common cause with the small States. 

The attitude of Connecticut, says the author, has generally been 
represented as that of a “ small State ” intent on upholding every 
possible reservation of State sovereignty. Such a representation the 
author stigmatizes as unfair. “ There was no reason for it a priori, 
and the State had nothing to gain by it. The theory of the large 
States, had it prevailed, would have given them absolute control of 
all branches of the government, and would have been the greatest 
of calamities for a real development of national spirit and power.” 

Connecticut, so far from arraying herself with the small States, 
“ desired a sound and practical national government, and the path 
to it was marked out for her delegates by their own common¬ 
wealth’s development and history for one hundred and fifty years.” 
(P. 320.) “ It is hardly too much to say that the birth of the Con¬ 
stitution was merely the grafting of the Connecticut system on 
the stock of the old confederation, where it has grown into richer 
luxuriance than Hooker could ever have dreamed of.” (P. 322.) 


27 


The antagonism between the large and small State plans, if per¬ 
sisted in, would have ensued in a deadlock. Connecticut’s dele¬ 
gates proposed a compromise, suggested out of the experience of 
their own commonwealth. On motion of Sherman and King, it 
was voted that representation in the first branch of the legislature 
should be proportional, not equal. Then Sherman and his other 
colleague, Ellsworth, moved to give each State an equal vote in 
the Senate. To this the large States refused to accede, despite the 
success of the proposition for proportional representation in the lower 
house, and it was not until the small States threatened to withdraw 
from the convention and to find a foreign power which would pro¬ 
tect them that the compromise could become successful. The 
question was finally referred to a committee, one of whose number 
was Franklin, who was favorable to the Connecticut plan, and it 
was carried. The organization of the House and Senate upon their 
different bases was due to Connecticut. 

There is much of abiding interest in this book. The foundation 
of the New Haven colony, the contrast between its polity and the 
freer spirit of Connecticut, its final absorption into the latter colony, 
and Connecticut’s wonderful industrial progress, are well told. 
Upon the subject of Connecticut’s abandonment of her claims to 
western territory the author suggestively says: “ One may well 
speculate as to the results on American history if such a people, 
instead of being cribbed into four thousand square miles of terri¬ 
tory, had been able to impress their characteristics on the popu¬ 
lation of the magnificent domain which was theirs by charter.” 
(P. 290.) 

The sturdy Connecticut freeman, created in a commonwealth de¬ 
veloped from Hooker’s democracy and nurtured in an atmosphere 
of individualism, became a proud exponent of the benignant influ¬ 
ences of civil and religious liberty. To him, as the author eloquently 
says at the close of the book, “ government has never been an 
institution upon which he was to lean for rest, or which he was 
to use for the purpose of evading the consequences of his own 
heedlessness, or which was to swallow up his personality.” It was 
“ a thing of special purpose, to be worked, like any other machine, 
to its highest capacity within its proper limits.” “ It was “ his crea¬ 
ture, not his maker.” ... a In these later days, when the indi¬ 
vidual is withering at a rate faster than seems to be altogether 
convenient, when it is believed that democracy and individualism 


28 


are no longer quite convertible terms, there may be a useful lesson 
in the record of the commonwealth of Connecticut—unbroken suc¬ 
cess so far as she has followed out her fundamental principle; em¬ 
barrassment and danger only so far as she has allowed it to be 
infringed.” 

“ Connecticut,” in the opinion of some competent judges, is our 
author’s best and most enduring work. It was carefully and de¬ 
liberately composed, in the intervals of other labor, during about 
two years before its publication. Before its appearance his repu¬ 
tation was firmly established, both here and in England, and it 
must have been founded mainly upon his “ History of American 
Politics ” and the articles in Lalor’s Cyclopaedia. So well had he 
become known abroad at this date that he was retained by the 
editors of the Encyclopaedia Britannica to prepare for the Britan- 
nica “ The United States, its History and Constitution.” The selec¬ 
tion of Professor Johnston for this important service was regarded 
by his associates at Princeton as an unusual honor, and one of them, 
in a subsequent interview with Professor Bryce, one of the editors, 
inquired why, among all American historians, this choice had been 
made. The reply of the distinguished editor was that Professor 
Johnston had been asked because he was the one man who under¬ 
stood the philosophical origin and development of American con¬ 
stitutions. It would be ungracious, and unjust to other eminent 
workers in the same field of literature, to ignore the circumstances 
under which this remark was evoked, but the statement serves at 
least to show that the selection was not accidental, but that the 
theory of our government developed by Professor Johnston had 
peculiarly impressed foreign students of our constitutional history. 

The article which was afterward contributed by him to the Bri¬ 
tannica was not commenced until February or March, 1887. It 
was prepared in duplicate upon a typewriter used for all his later 
productions, and one copy was dispatched across the ocean before 
the close of May, the other copy being retained by the. author. 
When we remember that this magnificent essay makes an octavo 
volume of two hundred and fifty pages, we may be able to com¬ 
prehend the facility with which it was written. Nor was it com¬ 
posed in a period of freedom from other duties, but in the midst 
of college work and contemporaneously with the preparation of 
several short papers. The ease and rapidity with which the author 
executed almost all his literary work are remarkable. We are re- 


2 9 


minded of Scott’s accidental discovery of the opening chapter of 
his abandoned “ Waverley,” his resumption of the composition of the 
story, and his completion of it in about four weeks, and his com¬ 
position of “ Guy Mannering ” in an interval of six weeks about the 
Christmas after “ Waverley ” was finished. The author of “ Waver¬ 
ley” is not more truly shown in his subsequent novels than the author 
of “ American Politics ” or of the papers contributed to Lalor’s Cy¬ 
clopaedia is in the Britannica essay; for every page is stamped with 
the writer’s characteristics; the same intellect is at work, but with 
matured and chastened vigor. The work stands to-day the only 
complete and philosophical record, within brief compass, of Anglo- 
Saxon life in the zone now comprised within the United States, 
from the sixteenth century to the latter part of the nineteenth, and 
not one real essential is lacking. Such a splendid edifice could have 
been designed only by a master architect after a thorough appren¬ 
ticeship; and if a career which bore so much promise had to be 
terminated in its early prime, a more fitting monument of a unique 
life could hardly have been erected than that which the author was 
privileged to rear for himself. 

The history of the United States is topically treated from the 
time of the first mustering of Englishmen on the Atlantic coast of 
North America, and the treatment is along the lines upon which 
the author had long considered that its development should be 
traced. They are substantially those adopted in the essays inter¬ 
spersed through his “ Representative Orations.” While the synthesis 
is not here first presented by him, the work is by no means a repe¬ 
tition of his earlier productions, but their appropriate capstone. It 
teems with striking paragraphs and pregnant sentences. “ Style,” 
says Mr. Lowell, “ will find readers and shape convictions, while 
mere truth gathers dust on the shelf.” While Professor Johnston 
never cultivated a literary style, nevertheless his writing is admi¬ 
rable and impressive, because, as Mr. Morley has well said of Burke, 
“ he knew so much, thought so comprehensively, and felt so 
strongly.” Here, more fully than elsewhere, with the possible 
exception of an article upon “ Law, Logic, and Government,” in the 
Princeton Review for March, 1888, has the author exhibited the 
development of the idea which lay at the basis of the American 
Revolution; and, apart from Professor Fiske, perhaps, no historian 
has discussed it with equal clearness or fullness. The colonial 
theory of the relations of Parliament to America was as much a 


30 


development as the now generally accepted theory of the relations 
of the States to the nation, which was never fully triumphant until 
the civil war. To the British lawyer of Blackstone’s day the Amer¬ 
ican colonies were merely corporations holding their charters at 
the pleasure of the crown, subject to the king’s visitation and 
amenable to dissolution by quo warranto proceedings in his courts. 
Above all, they were subject to legislation by Parliament, which, 
according to Blackstone, is “ boundless in its operations.” No 
collision between the colonies and the British government to test 
the British claim occurred before 1760, because until then, for a 
variety of reasons, the British principle had never been put into 
remorseless execution. But after Chatham’s brilliant policy had 
humiliated Britain’s enemies and extended her boundaries, the no¬ 
tion arose of an “ imperial parliament,” with jurisdiction beyond 
the four seas; and, coincidently with this development, came the 
desire to rule and the necessity for the imposition of heavy taxes 
to meet the drain caused by successful war. First, the old Navi¬ 
gation Act and the acts against colonial trade were revived and 
enforced; then Parliament claimed the power to commission colonial 
judges and officials, to hold office during the king’s pleasure; later 
followed the Stamp Act. All of these usurpations were justified 
by the application of the corporation theory to the colonies, but 
they merely drove the colonists to repudiate the theory and to deny 
the right of an English Parliament to levy taxes upon Americans. 
The Stamp Act was repealed, but even Chatham maintained that 
Parliament had the right to legislate over the commerce of America. 
To his mind, there was a distinction between the power to tax , 
which was not a legislative power, and the right to legislate. Taxes 
were granted by the Commons, but when the English Commons 
taxed Americans they were giving not their own money but the 
property of his Majesty’s Commons in America. This was, he 
thought, the prerogative of Americans alone; but nevertheless, in 
his view, the legislative jurisdiction of Parliament over America 
was supreme. 

To this view the colonists were for a time inclined to accede, 
but they soon came to feel that they were subjects of the king with 
parliaments of their own in the shape of their colonial assemblies, 
which had exclusive jurisdiction over their local affairs as well as 
the exclusive prerogative of granting their moneys for the crown. 
They resented the legislative interference of the Parliament of Great 


3i 


Britain just as the people of Great Britain might have resented that 
of the Parliament of Massachusetts. But they were for a while 
willing to acknowledge the existence of an imperial parliament with 
power to legislate for the empire upon all imperial concerns, such 
as matters of commerce, provided they had representation in it; 
and they constantly likened their case to that of Ireland, which 
had then its own local Parliament, or to that of Scotland, which 
had its separate Parliament before the union. But from this position 
they were driven by the later oppressive acts of the British Parlia¬ 
ment, and thus forced either to acknowledge its legislative suprem¬ 
acy or to deny the usurpation altogether. This last was their 
eventual attitude. Step by step they were driven from denying 
the right of the British Parliament to tax them without representa¬ 
tion, to a denial of the right of the British Parliament to legislate 
over them, “ from objection to taxation by Parliament into objec¬ 
tions to legislation by Parliament.” Their sole allegiance was to 
the king, their relations with him alone; they had nothing to do 
with Parliament. The king had ceased to be merely King of Great 
Britain and Ireland; “ he had at least thirteen kingdoms beyond 
the seas and a parliament in each of them.” . . . “ It needed many 
years of successful but suicidal logic on the part of their opponents 
to force the Americans to this point; they even continued to peti¬ 
tion Parliament till 1774, but after that time they were no longer 
inconsistent, and held that the king was the only bond of union 
between the different parts of the empire.” Their final Declaration 
of Independence is a declaration of their independence of the king 
only: “ they do not then admit that the British Parliament had 
ever had any authority over them, and that body is only mentioned 
in one place, in one of the counts of the indictment of the king, 
for having given his assent to certain acts of pretended legislation, 
passed by a jurisdiction foreign to our constitutions and unac¬ 
knowledged by our laws—that is to say, by the British Parliament.” 
Although the first Continental Congress (1765) had memorialized 
Parliament as well as the king, the congress of 1774 omitted Parlia¬ 
ment in its petition. “ It was at last seen to be an awkward con¬ 
cession ” to memorialize a body whose jurisdiction was repudiated. 

This view is an advance upon the commonly accepted notion, 
which is that Americans would have been contented with repre¬ 
sentation in the English legislature. Out of that notion has grown 
the impression, which even Burke shared, and perhaps with jus- 


3 2 


tice, that the encroachments of Parliament upon the liberties of 
America were the first steps toward similar encroachments upon 
the liberties of the English people. But America could not have 
been satisfied to be represented at Westminster or to vest the right 
of internal taxation or legislation upon her local concerns in the 
representatives of America and of England jointly. The autonomy 
which Ireland demands and which has been recently granted to 
Australia is the least she would have accepted, although she might 
have acknowledged a federal parliament sitting at Westminster as 
the ultimate jurisdiction upon matters of imperial interest affecting 
alike his Majesty’s subjects in England and America. 

In Professor Johnston’s exposition of the confederation and of 
the Constitution he adheres to the views we have already outlined 
in mention of his earlier works. In the development of democracy 
(1789-1829), in the epoch of industrial development and sectional 
divergence (1829-1850), in the tendencies to disunion (1850-1861), 
in the treatment of slavery, civil war, and reconstruction, we recog¬ 
nize the touch of the same master hand. 

On September 17, 1787, the Federal Convention, having com¬ 
pleted its work, adjourned with a letter to Congress asking for the 
transmission of the Constitution which it had framed to the con¬ 
ventions of the several States for ratification or rejection. The 
approach of the first centenary of this event set Professor Johnston 
thinking upon the work of that convention, which had once been 
styled by Mr. Gladstone as “ the most wonderful work ever struck 
off at a given time by the brain and purpose of man.” Our author’s 
study of institutional development compelled him to reject the 
Gladstonian notion, for it was beyond the range of probability that 
a body as wise even as the convention should have produced a 
Hat constitution with such few defects as experience has discovered 
in the organic law of the United States. That Constitution was 
the fruitage of colonial and State experience. This idea is pre¬ 
sented and illustrated, in the author’s usual clear style, in his article, 
“ The First Century of the Constitution,” in the New Princeton 
Review for September, 1887. The work of the convention, so far 
from being a creation, was mainly that of selection from the pro¬ 
visions of the then existing State constitutions, themselves the 
product of colonial evolution. The members of the Federal Con¬ 
vention were too sagacious to make experiments in constitution 


33 


framing; nearly all the articles of the Constitution were derived from 
the State experience to which the Federalist repeatedly appeals; 
thence came its bicameral congress, its distinctions between the 
Senate and House, together with the names themselves; the name 
and office of President; the theory of rotation in the Senate; the 
census provisions; the government and administration of the two 
houses; provisions for the origination of money bills in the popular 
house; the provisions for a message, for impeachment, for pardon 
of convicts; as to the appointing power, and numerous other 
features. The greatest achievement of the convention, as it has 
always been considered by our most eminent constitutional ex¬ 
pounders—that is, the creation of the judiciary and its establish¬ 
ment as a co-ordinate branch of the government—was not alto¬ 
gether a novelty, but exists in germ in the State constitutions. The 
most serious departure from the beaten path of precedent was in 
the provision for an electoral college. The electoral system was 
purely artificial; it existed, as framed, for only a short time, and 
the growth of democracy has so transformed it that the discre¬ 
tionary feature of it, which in the eyes of the framers of the Con¬ 
stitution constituted its greatest merit, has been completely oblit¬ 
erated. “ Since the election of John Adams, no elector has dared 
to regard himself as more than a ministerial functionary registering 
his party’s will.” 

The practical deduction of the author is, that the success of the 
American Constitution is proof that a viable constitution can not 
be struck off at a given time from the brain and purpose of man. 

The members of the Constitutional Convention would have been 
the first to protest against such misconstruction of their work. Nat¬ 
ural growth alone gives the promise as well as the potency of 
permanence. “ If there is any secret in the general political success 
of our branch of the human race, it is that its political methods 
have been institutional rather than legislative.” The idea is en¬ 
countered at the threshold of the Declaration of Independence, but 
despite the intensity of our political admiration for the work of 
the fathers, our present tendency is to lose sight of our political 
traditions and to exalt legislation. Here we have the same wise 
lesson with which the volume upon Connecticut closed. Legal 
enactments can not accelerate natural processes in social life; and, 
optimistic as the author was in his outlook for the republic, he 
was never so optimistic as to advocate the acceptance of offhand 


34 

cures for political evils or to favor legislation requiring their adop¬ 
tion. 

The ideas embodied in this essay Professor Johnston considered 
among his best and most original utterances; and that his estimate 
was not far amiss is seen in the conspicuous place a large extract 
from this paper has in the appendix to the “ American Common¬ 
wealth,” whose author, lightly touching the same idea in one of his 
own chapters, observes in a footnote that the same thought has 
been worked out with much force and fullness by Professor John¬ 
ston in an article which appeared after his chapter had been written, 
but before its publication. 

The literary career of Professor Johnston was practically ended 
a year before his death. For an even longer period, with brief 
intermissions, illness suspended his college duties. His literary life 
covers hardly nine years. Complete enumeration of his produc¬ 
tions has not been attempted. His vocation was that of teaching. 
But he was more than a university instructor—he was a genuine 
teacher of the people. He had the keenest interest in all the 
political movements of the time; he kept abreast of its political 
literature; he was always learning and assimilating the teachings 
of others. By nature and habit a student, yet he never seemed 
the cloistered academic, but rather a happy admixture of scholar 
and man of the active world. He could with ease have slipped 
the scholastic traces, and he would have glided with aptitude into 
any lofty political place and have filled it with credit and honor. 
His opinions of other writers were never marked by small vanity 
or irritated conceit, but were such as distinguished lofty and gen¬ 
erous natures. He was not a man to reserve his best thoughts for 
books. His ideas were impressed upon pupils and friends with all 
his clearness and exuberance, and with quaint, homely, and forcible 
similes from all conceivable sources; and his fascinating manner 
and evident sincerity helped to rivet in the memory the lessons 
he inculcated. In the readiness and simplicity of his illustrations 
he has been compared with Lincoln. As has been well said of 
him by the President of Princeton, “ he could subsidize all depart¬ 
ments of life and borrow his illustrations from the farm and the 
bank, from the trades and the professions, and he seemed to have 
an inexhaustible fund of material in reserve.” All his conversa¬ 
tion bore the stamp of the mental mint from which it issued. Dr. 
Samuel Johnson once said of Burke, that “ if you were to meet 


35 


him in the street, where you were stopped by a drove of oxen, and 
you and he stepped aside to take shelter for five minutes, he would 
talk to you in such a manner that when you parted you would say, 
‘ This is an extraordinary man.’ ” Such was also the nature of 
Alexander Johnston. Gifted with a lively and social temperament, 
and with such fluency of utterance, his vast attainments, his ready 
intelligence, his acute observation and profound thinking awakened 
the certain conviction not only that he was an entertaining and 
instructive talker, but that he was an extraordinary man. 

Amid the enforced quiet and isolation of his last year he more 
than once expressed a desire to renew his work, and obscurely hinted 
at the thoughts to which he would give expression. What ideas 
were then seething in that fertile brain we shall never know. Had 
he lived he would have left no “ topics of the time”* untouched. He 
was keenly conscious that our once homogeneous people, whose 
institutions, as he himself taught, were formed before the com¬ 
mencement of the great European immigrations, was now absorb¬ 
ing extraneous elements, diverse from the parent stocks, at a peril¬ 
ously rapid rate. When ballot reform received its first impulse a 
few years ago, he advocated its adoption in New Jersey; and he 
would have hailed its adoption in twenty-four States as proof of 
our institutional integrity and our still enduring homogeneity. Of 
the problem of city government, our fathers, he says, knew little 
or nothing; but he believed that it could be solved only in the same 
manner as they had solved the problem of national government, 
by consulting the charts of experience. He would foster the spirit 
of urban independence, and allow the cities of the Union to work 
out their salvation as the States have done. A keen observer of 
political tendencies, he had a sort of prescience of the political 
revolution of November (1890), for he once said in the spring of 
1889 that he would not be surprised if a great Democratic awaken¬ 
ing should take place in the fall of 1890, analogous to that which 
happened in the congressional election next after the presidential 
campaign of 1840. The conditions were similar, and the Whig 
success of 1840 was followed two years later by a return of a 
majority of Democrats to the House of Representatives. Con¬ 
vinced of the destiny of the nation and abhorring all closet panaceas 
for political evils, he was, nevertheless, candid in inquiring whether 

* Professor Johnston wrote many papers for the Century Magazine under the head¬ 
ing “ Topics of the Time.” 



36 


the reconciliation of Democracy with modern industrial conditions 
was possible without an abandonment of political creeds at present 
as firmly accepted as was the British theory of the colonies which 
brought about the Revolution. 

Time alone can determine the enduring value of Alexander 
Johnston’s work, but to me it seems to possess something of the 
same imperishable nature as exists in the work of our early political 
thinkers who, although dead, exercise more potent influence than 
while living. Webster, partially appreciated by his contemporaries, 
was first fully understood when the throes of civil war taught the 
force of his arguments for nationality. In the peaceful cemetery 
at Princeton the remains of Alexander Johnston lie, unhonored 
by stately shaft of bronze or granite; but the work which survives 
him has, I believe, elements of permanence. It represents the con¬ 
secration of a brief life to the interpretation of our national history; 
an interpretation always clear, always rich, always eloquent, always 
consistent, and, whether we accept it or not, always honest and 
never sullied by any sordid motive, pecuniary or partisan. 



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